'I'm almost blind, I see very poorly,' said the old man, seated on the bench on the veranda. 'But it seems very beautiful here, very peaceful.'
Only then did the inspector realize where he had seen the old man. Actually, it wasn't exactly him, but a perfect double, a jacket-flap photo of Jorge Luis Borges.
'Would you like something to eat?'
'You're very kind,' said the old man after a moments hesitation. 'But just a small salad, perhaps some lean cheese, and a glass of wine.'
'Let's go inside, I've set the table.'
'Will you eat with me?'
Montalbano had a knot in the pit of his stomach, but above all he felt strangely moved.
'I've already eaten,' he lied.
'Then, if you don't mind, could you set me a place out here?'
Rizzitano had used the Sicilian verb conzare, meaning to set the table, like an outsider trying his best to speak the local language.
'What made me realize you'd figured almost everything out,' Rizzitano said while eating slowly, 'was an article in the Corriere. I can't watch television anymore, you know; all I see are shadows that hurt my eyes.'
'TV hurts my eyes, too, and my vision is excellent,' said Montalbano.
'But I already knew that you had found Lisetta and Mario. I have two sons; ones an engineer, the others a teacher like me, both married. One of my daughters-in-law is a rabid leghista, an insufferable imbecile. Actually, she's very fond of me, but she considers me an exception, since she thinks all southerners are criminals or, in the best of cases, lazy. She never misses an opportunity to say to me: You know, Papa, down in your parts, for her, my parts extend from Sicily up to and including Rome, in your parts so-and-so was murdered, so-and-so was kidnapped, so-and-so was arrested, so-and-so planted a bomb . . . Well, one day she said: In your own town, inside a cave, they found two young people murdered fifty years ago...'
'How's that?' Montalbano interjected. 'Does your family know you're from Vig?'
'Of course they know. However, I never told anyone, not even my wife, rest her soul, that I still owned property in Vig. I said my parents and most of my relatives had been wiped out during the bombing. In no way could anybody connect me with the corpses in the Crasticeddru; they didn't know that it was on a piece of my land. But when I heard the news, I got sick, with a high fever. Everything started coming violently back to me. But I was telling you about the article in the Corriere. It said that a police inspector in Vig, the same one who'd found the bodies, had not only succeeded in identifying the two young victims, but had also learned that the terra-cotta dogs name was Kytmyr. Well, that made me certain you'd managed to find my university thesis. And so I knew you were sending me a message. I lost some time persuading my sons to let me come here alone; I told them I wanted to revisit, one last time before I die, the place where I was born and lived as a boy.'
Montalbano was still not convinced on this point, so he went back to it.
'So everybody, in your home, knew that you were from Vig?'
'Why should I have hidden it? I never changed my name, either, and have never had false documents.'
'You mean you were able to disappear without ever wanting to disappear?'
'Exactly. A person is found when somebody really needs to find him, or really sets his mind to it ...In any case, you must believe me when I say that Ive lived my life with my real first and last names; I entered competitions and even won, I taught, I got married, had children, and I have grandchildren who bear my name. Now I'm retired, and my pension is made out to: Calogero Rizzitano, birthplace Vig.'
'But you must at least have written to, say, the town hall, or the university, to request the necessary documents?'
'Of course. I did write to them, and they sent me what I needed. You mustn't make a mistake of historical perspective, Inspector. At the time, nobody was looking for me.'
'But you didn't even claim the money the city government owed you for the expropriation of your land.'
'That was precisely the point. I'd had no contact with Vig for thirty years, since the older you get, the less you need documents from your birthplace. But the documents required for the expropriation money, those were a little risky. Somebody might have remembered me then. Whereas I had turned my back on Sicily long before that. I didn't want, I still don't want, to have anything to do with it. If there existed some kind of special device that could remove the blood circulating in my veins, I'd be happy.'
'Would you like to go for a walk along the beach?' Montalbano asked when his guest had finished eating.
They'd been walking for five minutes, the old man leaning on his cane but holding onto Montalbano with his other arm, when Rizzitano asked:
'Would you tell me how you were able to identify Lisetta and Mario? And how did you figure out that I was involved? Forgive me, but walking and talking at the same time is very taxing for me.'
...
As Montalbano was telling him the whole story, now and then the old man would twist his mouth as if to say that was not how it went.
Montalbano then felt Rizzitano's arm weighing heavier on his. Wrapped up in his own words, he hadn't noticed that the old man was tired from the walk.
'Shall we go back?'
They sat down again on the bench on the veranda.
'Well,' said Montalbano. 'Why don't you tell me how things really went?'
'Yes, of course, that's why Im here. But it costs me a great deal of effort.'
